Sunday, May 15, 2016

Staunton, May 14 – Many have
welcomed Vladimir Putin’s call to overcome the “red-white” division of Russians
that has existed since the Civil War as a step toward the rise of a supposedly
healthy Russian nationalism, but it is increasingly obvious that the only thing
the Kremlin wants from the two sides is their commitment to imperialism rather
than nationalism.

In a commentary on the Rufabula
portal, Russian regionalist Anton Chadsky makes this clear.He writes that “up to today, Russia remains
hostage to paradigms defined by the Bolshevik coup and the ensuing Civil War,”
a divide that the Kremlin says it wants to overcome so the schizoid nature of
Russian identity can end (rufabula.com/author/anton-chadsky/1195).

But he reasonably asks “what kind of
national ideology can we speak if the nation still cannot define what is evil
and what is good in its history” and argues despite all the Communists who have
become Orthodox and all the Cossacks who carry pictures of Stalin, overcoming
the divides of the immediate post-1917 years is not currently possible.

For such a unity to emerge, Chadsky
argues, the Russian people will have to clean “the Augean stables of all the
Soviet-Chekist propagandistic burden” that it still carries. Only then will it
be possible to be objective, “to call executioners executioners and heroes
heroes,” examples of which he says exist “on both sides of the barricades.”

Unfortunately, at least in the way
that Putin is approaching it, the current Russian leadership is interested in
extracting only certain things from the Reds and only certain things for the
Whites.It isn’t interested in promoting
social welfare as the Soviets at least said they were, and it isn’t interested
in a restoration of the pre-1917 order as most of the Whites were.

Instead, Putin and his ideological
entourage are interested in extracting only one thing that the two sides of the
old red-white divide shared: a common commitment to imperialism rather than
nationalism, a commitment that some have noted but that most seem to have
forgotten.

And Putin and his team are explicit
in rejecting the promotion of Russian nationalism because they understand that
if the Russians were ever able to truly become a “state-forming” nation as the
regime always say they are, the Russian Federation in its current borders would
be unsustainable given the size and vitality of non-Russian groups within it.

One of the reasons that the Whites
lost the Russian Civil War was because they were committed to the maintenance
of a Russian empire “one and indivisible;” and one of the reasons the Reds won
was because they appeared to promise something else but then imposed an imperial
rule far more intrusive and violent than anything the tsars had.

And one of the reasons that some in the
first Russian emigration –first the smenovekhovtsy and then others -- decided
to support the Soviet experience is because they understood that the Soviets
were effectively maintaining and even extending the empire, something their own
groups had been unable to do.

(For background on the failure of the
Whites to move from imperialism to nationalism and by extension of the failure
of the Reds to do the same see the detailed new study by historian Sergey
Sergeyev, “The Paths of Russian Nationalism: Catastrophe at Take-Off” at gefter.ru/archive/18535?_utl_t=fb).